Simultaneous campaigns

Clackamas (Ore.) Federal Credit Union began implementing data-driven marketing in the fall of 2021. By September 2022, the $650 million asset credit union had 25 to 35 marketing campaigns running simultaneously based on next-day data, says Hilary Kissell, director of marketing and community development.

Clackamas Federal scrambled to develop one-off, standalone marketing emails after its former email marketing vendor refused to allow a phased transition to a new marketing automation platform. That allowed the credit union’s five-member marketing team to gain experience quickly.

“Those one-offs were a good learning point for building an email template, setting up funnels, and checking to see what’s working,” Kissell says.

Clackamas Federal’s early automated campaigns focused on member onboarding and key products using data pulled from a business intelligence solution. A home equity loan campaign launched in February 2022 combined third-party and core data to target homeowners.

In the campaign’s first five months, emails to more than 35,000 members had a 61% open rate, leading to 127 home equity loans with a balance of $2.75 million.

The member onboarding campaign relies on four onboarding journeys to segment new members for promotion of “next best” products and services using seven different personalized offers.

The credit union uses another 15 marketing automation journeys to promote products. It monitors and tweaks campaigns based on early responses. Return-on-investment models built into the platform tally direct and indirect results of each effort.

Testing and education

Kissell notes that testing is a key element of developing marketing workflows that automate the delivery of offers and responses.

“If you think you’ve tested your workflow enough, test it five more times,” she says.

Education was critical to prepare the marketing team to apply data-driven tools. “It’s been a fun bonding experience for my team to go through this journey together,” Kissell says.

The marketing department shares data-driven marketing tactics and results with all employees by email, as well as during a recent presentation at an all-staff meeting.

“We need to tell our marketing story so our co-workers know what we’re doing to help,” Kissell says. “Getting to tell them that our home equity campaign was all intelligent decision-making based on data was really cool.”

Clackamas Federal will add text marketing in the coming months. Over time, Kissell will tie website and mobile app messages to data-driven marketing.

Top-down commitment

Isolated successes in using data to drive growth in mortgages and understanding digital app satisfaction allowed $4.8 billion asset Coastal Credit Union in Raleigh, N.C., to realize the benefits of making a top-down commitment to data-driven marketing, says Brandon McAdams, vice president, strategy and insights.

“We’re now on a journey to make data and advanced analytics foundational to all marketing efforts,” he says. “The true understanding of our members and their wants and needs is the key to serving them better through our products and services.”

Coastal consolidates data into a single view of each member to find “the right products and services for the right members at the right life-stage.” This effort includes:

• Creating a data set that includes all members, products, and services.
• Using analytical techniques to score every member against every product to determine their likelihood to adopt it.
• Identifying small member segments who share behavioral, geographic, attitudinal, and/or demographic characteristics.
• Developing targeted, personalized marketing content aimed at member segments with a high propensity to adopt a specific product or service.
• Delivering those appeals to small audiences in microcampaigns it can track and tweak.

McAdams says a vital step in the process was creating a structured analytics data library that transforms the raw data in Coastal’s data warehouse into the information required for both strategic decisions and marketing campaigns.

“Specifically, on the marketing side, these structured data elements encapsulate members’ attributes, behaviors, and history, which are all used to help us better identify the best targets,” McAdams says.

The data also helps prioritize long-term strategies. For example, Coastal explored the data when depositor segments began to transfer money out of the credit union.

“We know their ACH data, we know who they pay, and we have personal segmentation to understand what type of depositor they are and what brands they like,” he says.

That information revealed gaps in credit card and mortgage product lines that Coastal plans to address.

McAdams notes the need for education and enablement that allows “everyone to speak the same language around data.” 

Coastal launched an organization-wide data fluency initiative to integrate data and analytics into everyday operations.

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